For centuries, the Avignon Papacy has been portrayed as a period of corruption, weakness, and French domination over the medieval Church. But a modern political controversy involving the Pentagon and the Vatican has revealed how this powerful historical myth still shapes public perceptions today—and why the reality of the Avignon papacy was far more complex.
By Joëlle Rollo-Koster
At the beginning of April 2026, the Avignon papacy exploded in the news in connection to a Pentagon–Vatican controversy. Multiple outlets reported that senior U.S. Defense Department officials summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, for a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. According to reporting initially published by The Free Press and later echoed across mainstream and religious media, one official allegedly invoked the “Avignon Papacy” during what Vatican sources described as an unusually confrontational exchange.
The U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged that the January meeting occurred but strongly disputed claims that threats were made or that the Avignon Papacy was mentioned. Fact-checking organizations have labeled the allegations unproven, noting reliance on anonymous sources and conflicting accounts between Vatican and U.S. officials. This did not stop countless organizations from reporting on this so-called meeting and unleashed a torrent of falsehood on the Avignon papacy.
What is relevant at this point is that the Avignon Papacy was mentioned by commentators—with no fact checking, and the reference was widely interpreted as a historical warning. It alluded to the 14th-century period when secular power (the French crown) pressured and constrained the papacy. The reference was a veiled threat returning to a moment when a powerful state forced the pope into political dependency, when the papacy lost papal autonomy through coercion rather than consent. Explainers consistently emphasized that Avignon remains a powerful symbol of secular pressure on the papacy—which is precisely why it was rhetorically effective in modern diplomacy. But all of this is a myth.
The Avignon Papacy and its “Black Legend”
A map of Rome, showing an allegorical figure of Rome as a widow in black mourning the Avignon Papacy. Fazio degli Uberti, II Dittamondo, avec le commentaire d’ Andrea Morena da Lodi. Ms. Ital. 81. fol. 18r
The Avignon Papacy refers to the period from 1309 to 1376 when the popes resided in southern France rather than Rome. No commentator attempted to explain why the Avignon papacy is marred with a “Black Legend,” and explain why the legend continues, some 600 years after its end. The legend reflects the long-standing view that the Avignon popes were corrupt, decadent, spiritually bankrupt, and mere “French puppets” ruling during a “Babylonian Captivity.”
All of this is not historical reality. The “Black Legend” originated as propaganda, especially from Italian humanists like Petrarch and chroniclers like Giovanni Villani, who were committed to a Rome-centered papacy and resented the loss of curial power. They ignored the frequent papal residences of popes outside of Rome (Anagni, Orvieto, Viterbo, or Perugia) usually because the political situation was too unstable for them to stay there. They ignored that this instability was canonized by the great thirteenth century canonist the Hostiensis (Henry of Segusio) who coined the saying “ubi papa, ibi Roma” (where the pope is, there is Rome) who emphasized papal authority regardless of the pope’s location. Hence Rome did not make the pope. The pope made Rome.
As for Avignon, Petrarch’s inflammatory language (“Babylon on the Rhône”) shaped centuries of hostile interpretation, even though it was rhetorical and polemical rather than descriptive history. Later historians uncritically repeated these judgments, treating the Avignon papacy as an embarrassment instead of examining its records. The Avignon papacy was administratively effective, financially centralized, highly bureaucratic and innovative, and deeply engaged with European politics, diplomacy, and reform. Avignon functioned with a powerful and adaptive papal government, and was certainly not in a period of simple “decline.”
Why the Popes Moved to Avignon
15th-century depiction of Avignon, by the Master of Boucicaut – BnF. MS Francais 23279 fol. 81r
The papacy moved to Avignon not to please the French crown but for practical and political necessity. Rome was unsafe. It witnessed chronic violence between aristocratic clans (Colonna, Orsini, Caetani), who usually led urban unrest, anti-papal riots, and a general lack of security for the pope and population. The shock of the Outrage at Anagni (1303) showed how vulnerable popes could be. Avignon was not French territory in 1309 (it belonged to Provence). Pope Clement VI bought the city in 1348 (yes THAT year). In Avignon the popes were close to papal lands (the Comtat Venaissin) while their legates were trying to reconquer their papal territories in Italy (the most famous of whom was Cardinal Albornoz). Avignon offered safer, more accessible, and better-positioned grounds for diplomacy and it was well connected to European political networks.
Clement V (r. 1305–1314) never intended to move there permanently. He stayed because Italian instability continued. Later popes (especially Benedict XII) deepened institutional roots unintentionally, but in the end the papacy moved to Avignon to preserve its independence, security, and effectiveness, not because it was subservient to France.
The Avignon popes completed and intensified trends already underway since the thirteenth century. They created a highly professionalized, centralized bureaucracy, especially under John XXII, with systematic record-keeping (papal registers), an expansion of the role of the Apostolic Chamber, especially financially. They regularized chancery, judicial courts (Rota), and penitentiary to become a papacy that was more efficient, predictable, and powerful as a governing institution. They centralized papal finances to an unprecedented degree, regularizing all the Church’s revenue sources—Annates, subsidies, tithes, and various papal taxes. Their tax collection systems spanned most of Europe. This in turn allowed the papacy to fund diplomacy, war, and administration, and lessened reliance on erratic donations or Roman instability. While deeply unpopular, these measures made the papacy financially solvent and durable. Financial “exploitation” was not chaos or corruption but systematic governance—we still pay taxes today, though it fueled resentment that fed Avignon’s “Black Legend”.
Far from being French puppets, Avignon popes pursued papal interests, sometimes aligning with France, sometimes resisting it. They were mediators in the Hundred Years’ War, arbiters in imperial succession disputes, and oversaw Italian politics and the Papal States. Figures like Clement VI—who stated “my predecessors did not know how to be pope”—actively intervened in international crises and claimed the pope’s role as arbiter of Christendom. The Avignon popes defended plenitudo potestatis (fullness of papal power). They resisted imperial claims (e.g., Louis of Bavaria vs. John XXII), radical spiritual movements (e.g., Franciscan Spirituals), while popes like John XXII emphasized obedience, unity, and centralized doctrinal authority. Avignon popes strengthened papal monarchy at a time when national monarchies were rising.
The Avignon papacy governed during exceptionally adverse conditions: The Black Death, constant warfare caused by the Hundred Years’ War, and constant mercenary violence in France and Italy. The popes responded with emergency spiritual measures (indulgences, dispensations), organized charity and burial, and continued to administer despite demographic collapse. It adapted and survived. The Avignon popes ruled for Rome, even when ruling from Avignon. They never abandoned the traditional seat of the bishop of Rome. Still, Avignon grew into a working capital, comparable to Rome, Paris, or Florence—this also added to its later negative reputation.
The Great Western Schism
A 14th-century miniature symbolizing the schism – BnF, MS Français 2813, fol. 208r
But maybe the biggest maker of the “Black Legend” is what happened when stability returned to Italy and the popes returned to Rome. The Great Western Schism (1378–1417), when two and even three popes ruled simultaneously. The Great Western Schism was not the culmination of Avignon “degeneracy” but the consequence of unresolved tensions that surfaced precisely when the papacy attempted to reintegrate itself into Roman political life. Ironically, the very administrative strength developed at Avignon made a prolonged schism possible. Both obediences possessed the fiscal resources, legal structures, and diplomatic reach to function as competing papacies.
The Schism fractured Europe along emerging national lines—France, England, the Empire—not along theological ones. Competing obediences reflected the maturation of state power more than ecclesiastical decay. In hindsight, polemicists collapsed decades of distinct events into a single morality tale: Avignon became the scapegoat for a crisis that fully erupted only after its end. The memory of multiple popes hardened earlier humanist critiques into historical dogma. The Great Western Schism did not expose the weakness of the Avignon papacy—it exposed the incompatibility between a centralized papal monarchy and a Europe entering the age of competitive states.
Avignon’s Enduring Myth
Wall painting in Avignon showing its nine popes – photo by Véronique PAGNIER / Wikimedia Commons
The sudden reappearance of the Avignon Papacy in the context of an alleged Pentagon–Vatican confrontation was striking not because of what it revealed about contemporary diplomacy, but because of what it revealed about the enduring power of historical myth. The reference—whether actually spoken or merely reported—relied entirely on the assumption that “Avignon” still functions as shorthand for papal humiliation, captivity, and political subservience. That assumption went largely unquestioned. Reporters, commentators, and analysts treated the allusion as self-evident, as if the meaning of Avignon was settled, obvious, and universally agreed upon.
The same Avignon papacy that modern rhetoric invokes as a symbol of weakness was, in reality, one of the strongest papacies the Middle Ages produced. And the episode most often used to condemn it—the Great Western Schism—was not its failure, but its unintended legacy. The Schism was made possible by Avignon’s success: by a centralized papal monarchy capable of sustaining rival obediences across a fragmented political Europe. What collapsed was not papal authority itself, but its compatibility with an emerging system of competitive sovereign states.
The Pentagon story, whether factual or apocryphal, demonstrates how the “Black Legend” continues to function six centuries later. Avignon endures less as a historical event than as a rhetorical weapon stripped of scholarship, flattened into moral allegory, and deployed to signal domination, dependency, or threat.
Avignon was not the moment when the papacy lost its autonomy. It was the moment when it learned how to govern without relying on proximity, tradition, or local power. If Avignon offers any lesson to the present, it is not one of captivity, but of resilience—and of the dangers that arise when strength, misremembered as weakness, is used as a tool of intimidation.
For centuries, the Avignon Papacy has been portrayed as a period of corruption, weakness, and French domination over the medieval Church. But a modern political controversy involving the Pentagon and the Vatican has revealed how this powerful historical myth still shapes public perceptions today—and why the reality of the Avignon papacy was far more complex.
By Joëlle Rollo-Koster
At the beginning of April 2026, the Avignon papacy exploded in the news in connection to a Pentagon–Vatican controversy. Multiple outlets reported that senior U.S. Defense Department officials summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, for a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. According to reporting initially published by The Free Press and later echoed across mainstream and religious media, one official allegedly invoked the “Avignon Papacy” during what Vatican sources described as an unusually confrontational exchange.
The U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged that the January meeting occurred but strongly disputed claims that threats were made or that the Avignon Papacy was mentioned. Fact-checking organizations have labeled the allegations unproven, noting reliance on anonymous sources and conflicting accounts between Vatican and U.S. officials. This did not stop countless organizations from reporting on this so-called meeting and unleashed a torrent of falsehood on the Avignon papacy.
What is relevant at this point is that the Avignon Papacy was mentioned by commentators—with no fact checking, and the reference was widely interpreted as a historical warning. It alluded to the 14th-century period when secular power (the French crown) pressured and constrained the papacy. The reference was a veiled threat returning to a moment when a powerful state forced the pope into political dependency, when the papacy lost papal autonomy through coercion rather than consent. Explainers consistently emphasized that Avignon remains a powerful symbol of secular pressure on the papacy—which is precisely why it was rhetorically effective in modern diplomacy. But all of this is a myth.
The Avignon Papacy and its “Black Legend”
The Avignon Papacy refers to the period from 1309 to 1376 when the popes resided in southern France rather than Rome. No commentator attempted to explain why the Avignon papacy is marred with a “Black Legend,” and explain why the legend continues, some 600 years after its end. The legend reflects the long-standing view that the Avignon popes were corrupt, decadent, spiritually bankrupt, and mere “French puppets” ruling during a “Babylonian Captivity.”
All of this is not historical reality. The “Black Legend” originated as propaganda, especially from Italian humanists like Petrarch and chroniclers like Giovanni Villani, who were committed to a Rome-centered papacy and resented the loss of curial power. They ignored the frequent papal residences of popes outside of Rome (Anagni, Orvieto, Viterbo, or Perugia) usually because the political situation was too unstable for them to stay there. They ignored that this instability was canonized by the great thirteenth century canonist the Hostiensis (Henry of Segusio) who coined the saying “ubi papa, ibi Roma” (where the pope is, there is Rome) who emphasized papal authority regardless of the pope’s location. Hence Rome did not make the pope. The pope made Rome.
As for Avignon, Petrarch’s inflammatory language (“Babylon on the Rhône”) shaped centuries of hostile interpretation, even though it was rhetorical and polemical rather than descriptive history. Later historians uncritically repeated these judgments, treating the Avignon papacy as an embarrassment instead of examining its records. The Avignon papacy was administratively effective, financially centralized, highly bureaucratic and innovative, and deeply engaged with European politics, diplomacy, and reform. Avignon functioned with a powerful and adaptive papal government, and was certainly not in a period of simple “decline.”
Why the Popes Moved to Avignon
The papacy moved to Avignon not to please the French crown but for practical and political necessity. Rome was unsafe. It witnessed chronic violence between aristocratic clans (Colonna, Orsini, Caetani), who usually led urban unrest, anti-papal riots, and a general lack of security for the pope and population. The shock of the Outrage at Anagni (1303) showed how vulnerable popes could be. Avignon was not French territory in 1309 (it belonged to Provence). Pope Clement VI bought the city in 1348 (yes THAT year). In Avignon the popes were close to papal lands (the Comtat Venaissin) while their legates were trying to reconquer their papal territories in Italy (the most famous of whom was Cardinal Albornoz). Avignon offered safer, more accessible, and better-positioned grounds for diplomacy and it was well connected to European political networks.
Clement V (r. 1305–1314) never intended to move there permanently. He stayed because Italian instability continued. Later popes (especially Benedict XII) deepened institutional roots unintentionally, but in the end the papacy moved to Avignon to preserve its independence, security, and effectiveness, not because it was subservient to France.
The Avignon popes completed and intensified trends already underway since the thirteenth century. They created a highly professionalized, centralized bureaucracy, especially under John XXII, with systematic record-keeping (papal registers), an expansion of the role of the Apostolic Chamber, especially financially. They regularized chancery, judicial courts (Rota), and penitentiary to become a papacy that was more efficient, predictable, and powerful as a governing institution. They centralized papal finances to an unprecedented degree, regularizing all the Church’s revenue sources—Annates, subsidies, tithes, and various papal taxes. Their tax collection systems spanned most of Europe. This in turn allowed the papacy to fund diplomacy, war, and administration, and lessened reliance on erratic donations or Roman instability. While deeply unpopular, these measures made the papacy financially solvent and durable. Financial “exploitation” was not chaos or corruption but systematic governance—we still pay taxes today, though it fueled resentment that fed Avignon’s “Black Legend”.
Far from being French puppets, Avignon popes pursued papal interests, sometimes aligning with France, sometimes resisting it. They were mediators in the Hundred Years’ War, arbiters in imperial succession disputes, and oversaw Italian politics and the Papal States. Figures like Clement VI—who stated “my predecessors did not know how to be pope”—actively intervened in international crises and claimed the pope’s role as arbiter of Christendom. The Avignon popes defended plenitudo potestatis (fullness of papal power). They resisted imperial claims (e.g., Louis of Bavaria vs. John XXII), radical spiritual movements (e.g., Franciscan Spirituals), while popes like John XXII emphasized obedience, unity, and centralized doctrinal authority. Avignon popes strengthened papal monarchy at a time when national monarchies were rising.
The Avignon papacy governed during exceptionally adverse conditions: The Black Death, constant warfare caused by the Hundred Years’ War, and constant mercenary violence in France and Italy. The popes responded with emergency spiritual measures (indulgences, dispensations), organized charity and burial, and continued to administer despite demographic collapse. It adapted and survived. The Avignon popes ruled for Rome, even when ruling from Avignon. They never abandoned the traditional seat of the bishop of Rome. Still, Avignon grew into a working capital, comparable to Rome, Paris, or Florence—this also added to its later negative reputation.
The Great Western Schism
But maybe the biggest maker of the “Black Legend” is what happened when stability returned to Italy and the popes returned to Rome. The Great Western Schism (1378–1417), when two and even three popes ruled simultaneously. The Great Western Schism was not the culmination of Avignon “degeneracy” but the consequence of unresolved tensions that surfaced precisely when the papacy attempted to reintegrate itself into Roman political life. Ironically, the very administrative strength developed at Avignon made a prolonged schism possible. Both obediences possessed the fiscal resources, legal structures, and diplomatic reach to function as competing papacies.
The Schism fractured Europe along emerging national lines—France, England, the Empire—not along theological ones. Competing obediences reflected the maturation of state power more than ecclesiastical decay. In hindsight, polemicists collapsed decades of distinct events into a single morality tale: Avignon became the scapegoat for a crisis that fully erupted only after its end. The memory of multiple popes hardened earlier humanist critiques into historical dogma. The Great Western Schism did not expose the weakness of the Avignon papacy—it exposed the incompatibility between a centralized papal monarchy and a Europe entering the age of competitive states.
Avignon’s Enduring Myth
The sudden reappearance of the Avignon Papacy in the context of an alleged Pentagon–Vatican confrontation was striking not because of what it revealed about contemporary diplomacy, but because of what it revealed about the enduring power of historical myth. The reference—whether actually spoken or merely reported—relied entirely on the assumption that “Avignon” still functions as shorthand for papal humiliation, captivity, and political subservience. That assumption went largely unquestioned. Reporters, commentators, and analysts treated the allusion as self-evident, as if the meaning of Avignon was settled, obvious, and universally agreed upon.
The same Avignon papacy that modern rhetoric invokes as a symbol of weakness was, in reality, one of the strongest papacies the Middle Ages produced. And the episode most often used to condemn it—the Great Western Schism—was not its failure, but its unintended legacy. The Schism was made possible by Avignon’s success: by a centralized papal monarchy capable of sustaining rival obediences across a fragmented political Europe. What collapsed was not papal authority itself, but its compatibility with an emerging system of competitive sovereign states.
The Pentagon story, whether factual or apocryphal, demonstrates how the “Black Legend” continues to function six centuries later. Avignon endures less as a historical event than as a rhetorical weapon stripped of scholarship, flattened into moral allegory, and deployed to signal domination, dependency, or threat.
Avignon was not the moment when the papacy lost its autonomy. It was the moment when it learned how to govern without relying on proximity, tradition, or local power. If Avignon offers any lesson to the present, it is not one of captivity, but of resilience—and of the dangers that arise when strength, misremembered as weakness, is used as a tool of intimidation.
Joëlle Rollo-Koster is professor of medieval history at the University of Rhode Island and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She is the author of both Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (Cambridge, 2025)
Top Image: Early 17th-century drawing of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, by Étienne Martellange (1569–1641)
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